Minneapolis - Day 4

Our final full day in Minneapolis.

Today was the day of the big game. It was the Minnesota Vikings versus the Houston Texans. Since neither Adam nor myself had a vested interest in the game, we were both rooting for the home team, the Vikings. We arrived an hour or 2 before the game and wandered around the outside of the stadium and inside as well, just getting a feel for the place. The Vikings play inside a dome stadium that has an inflated roof. That means if enough air was let out of the stadium, the roof would collapse. It is not too often that we both find ourselves rooting for the home team, but that is what happened this afternoon. The game was so much fun, it is hard to accurately describe how the game felt. It was definitely electric. This game marks the very first time I have ever ended up on the jumbo-tron in the stadium. The jumbo-tron is the gigantic TV that everyone looks at to see what is happening during the game if they cannot see it from their seats. So at one point in the game, it was my face rooting for the Vikings that was broadcast throughout the entire stadium. It was pretty awesome!!! In addition, only a few minutes later, they aimed their cameras at Adam and he was on the very same screen. I have to say, that was one of the most awesome things that has happened to either one of us since we started this stadium tour over five years ago. The final score was Minnesota 28 and Houston 21.

After the game we went back to the hotel and watched the rest of the games from the hotel. Because we had such bad neighbors on Friday night, the hotel gave us credit for 4 free drinks, so we went down to the hotel bar and I saw my favorite team, the New England Patriots lose to the Indianapolis Colts (which sucked). At least we got a few free drinks out of it, I guess.

Tomorrow, we head off to the airport and go back to LA. This was a pretty fun trip, as all of our trips are turning out to be. It was pretty cool to get to get a close up view of Minneapolis & I look forward to wherever we go next year.

Minneapolis - Day 3

Wow, what a long night that was!

After Adam & I had gone to sleep Halloween evening, a group of party people took residence in the hotel room right next to ours. Unlike Adam (who called the front desk at 2:30am), I was lucky enough to have not heard them when they started partying at 2am, but they woke me up at 4:30 with their music blaring and their extra loud party screaming. At 5am I called the front desk to complain and was told they would stop it. Unfortunately, it only stopped for a half hour or so then started right back up. As of 9am it was still going strong! Another call to the front desk told us that the people next to us were checking out in an hour or 2. Since we got so little sleep, we really didn't get a start on the day until about noon.

We decided to go walking down to the Mississippi River and walk a 2 mile trail called the St. Anthony Falls Heritage Trail. It was a nice walk that gave us a chance to get close to the bank of the river. The first half was nice, but not too far from a street with steady traffic on it. There was a nice path that led us straight to the riverside too. The second half of the path was a heavily populated bike path that offered no great views at all. After walking the trail, we decided to walk to a popular Sculpture garden, but that didn't really go as planned either. Unfortunately a lot of Minneapolis roads are under construction and some are even totally closed, so we had to take detours from detour and we ended up not able to find the garden. We wandered back to the downtown area and found that a lot of the restaurant & fast food places in our neck of the woods closed at 2pm on Saturday!

After walking around for over 4 hours, we decided to relax at the hotel before going out for dinner. After returning to the hotel after dinner we found out that our new neighbors were just as loud as the old ones from the previous night. That was the final straw and Adam went down to the front desk and they ended up moving us into a very very nice suite! So we end the day a lot more content than we began it and look forward to a nice quite night of sleep before we go to the football game tomorrow.